The Meanings of a Disaster

Reviewed by: The Meanings of a Disaster: Chernobyl and Its Afterlives in Britain and France by Karena Kalmbach Scott Gabriel Knowles (bio) The Meanings of a Disaster: Chernobyl and Its Afterlives in Britain and France By Karena Kalmbach. New York: Berghahn, 2021. Pp. 236. Disasters shape politics, even at a distance. The prototype is the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, causing incalculable, intergenerational harm in Ukraine, while simultaneously causing fear and public debate over nuclear risk in nations around the world. This is a key insight of Karena Kalmbach's deeply researched new book, The Meanings of a Disaster. The health impacts of Chernobyl in Britain and France were minimal compared to some other countries. But as the only nuclear powers in Western Europe, both France and Britain each contained their own highly complicated nuclear complexes and cultures, and it is these cultures in flux that Kalmbach investigates. Through a close analysis of media coverage, public debate, and policy formation—conducted in a longitudinal model over a twenty-year span—the book reveals the factors that can transform a faraway disaster into an event of pressing local concern. Kalmbach expertly traces the debates beyond the pages of periodicals and popular books and delves into public science debates and nuclear expert disagreements. Three key points of comparison structure the analysis. The first is the discourse around "personal affectedness." This is the material level, the struggle to understand how much radiation people absorbed in the atmosphere or ingested through food and water. The second is the spectrum of psychological impact running from radiophobia—the belief that nuclear fear itself is the enemy—on one side, and apocalypse—a floating worry that the true cost of the disaster will be understood genetically over a very long stretch of time—on the other. Third, and of comparatively less importance after the end of the Cold War, Kalmbach traces and compares the deployment of and backlash against anti–Eastern European and anti-Soviet stereotypes to explain the Chernobyl incident. In both Britain and France, the news reporting of Chernobyl was immediate. Public concern ran high in both nations. British authorities established a hotline that was overwhelmed by calls. Bad memories—such as the 1957 fire at the Windscale nuclear power plant—quickly resurfaced. Kalmbach points to the staggering fact that despite British preparations for domestic nuclear [End Page 906] disasters, "there were no such precautions for a nuclear accident overseas" (p. 23). Initial efforts to downplay Chernobyl's impact in Britain were superseded by warnings against drinking contaminated rainwater and milk—the impact on sheep emerged as a signal concern (and a classic case for STS researcher Brian Wynne). In France, the Service Central de Protection Contre les Rayonnements Ionisants (SCPRI), led by Pierre Pellerin, had experts on camera quickly and aggressively downplaying both the impact of radioactive fallout and skewering the construction of Chernobyl in comparison to superior French reactor designs. Confronted soon afterward with contrary evidence by indignant reporters, French officials blundered into what came to be called the affaire Tchernobyl, the exposure of a policy of nuclear secrecy and a serious blow to public confidence in nuclear experts like Pellerin. Here Kalmbach makes a crucial analytical contribution: of the two nations, France had a far greater reliance on nuclear power in its national supply (80 percent compared to Britain's 16 percent), and a correspondingly larger nuclear techno-elite workforce. Antinuclear activism in Britain was largely focused on the abolition of weapons, a concern blunted by the end of the Cold War. In sum, "the British Chernobyl debate put the accident in a global perspective, whereas the French Chernobyl debate focused on the impact at home" (p. 78). By the time of the tenth anniversary of Chernobyl, concern in Britain was light, even though restrictions on some sheep farms were still in place. Kalmbach explains that any lingering Chernobyl concerns were externalized to empathy and charity for children in Eastern Europe affected by the disaster, and that even domestic nuclear power debates centered on issues of cost, not safety. Meanwhile in France, where the affaire Tchernobyl still functioned as a live rallying point for antinuclear activism, the tenth anniversary marked a moment for reexamination

Atmosphere (unit) · Geography · Harm · Meteorology · Nuclear disaster · Nuclear plant · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Engineering · History · Law · Nuclear Issues and Defense · Risk Perception and Management

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